6.2.7.5 Collecting Unspecified Attributes: `XmlAnyAttribute`

An XML element may carry attributes which aren't defined in the XML schema, or have no explicit mapping to some field in the Java class defining the element type. It's possible to collect these unspecified attributes into a map with the type Map<QName,Object>. Here is an example using the annotation XmlAnyAttribute:

public class MixtureType {
    private Map<QName,Object> any;
    private String title;

    public MixtureType(){}

    @XmlAnyAttribute
    public Map<QName,Object> getAny(){
        if( any == null ){
	    any = new HashMap<QName,Object>();
	}
        return any;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public String getTitle(){
	return title;
    }
    public void setTitle( String value ){
	title = value;
    }
}

Let's assume that the top level element of type DocumentType contains nothing but one MixtureType element. Then, an XML data file that can be unmarshalled into an object of this class would look like this:

<document>
  <mixture foo="a foo attribute" bar="attribute of bar">
    <title>A mixture of elements</title>
  </mixture>
</document>

After unmarshalling this into a DocumentType object, the sub-element and its spurious attributes can be extracted like this:

JAXBElement<DocumentType> jbe =
    (JAXBElement)u.unmarshal( new File( "mixture.xml" ) );       
DocumentType doc = jbe.getValue();
MixtureType mix = doc.getMixture();
System.out.println( "Title: " + mix.getTitle() );
Map<QName,Object> amap = mix.getAny();
for( Map.Entry<QName,Object> e: amap.entrySet() ){
    System.out.println( e.getKey() + "=\"" + e.getValue() + "\"" );
}

This is the resulting output:

A mixture of elements
foo="a foo attribute"
bar="attribute of bar"

table of contents

6.2.7.5 Collecting Unspecified Attributes: XmlAnyAttribute

6.2.7.5 Collecting Unspecified Attributes: `XmlAnyAttribute`